I am on a year-long health journey in 2025. In the early stages of this journey I’ve found myself being asked to “rate my pain” on a scale of one to ten. Have you ever had to do that? I find the question hard to answer. What, after all, constitutes a 2 on the pain scale? A 7? A 3.5? What if I’m pain tolerant? What if I’m pain averse?
In a recent visit to the hospital I spotted this poster on the wall.
From my vantage point, I thought it was going to be helpful. But I got closer and discovered it really wasn’t enlightening. Hurts a “little bit” vs. a “little more” vs. “even more”? I didn’t find this particularly useful – although I did like the faces!
It got me thinking about our students. When I was in the faculty role, I recall doing a rather mediocre job helping my students understand my grading standards. I certainly talked about my expectations for their writing assignments (essay questions on exams, research assignments, etc.), and I talked about how I construct exams (I wasn’t testing memorization).. But I didn’t develop clear rubrics early in my teaching career. That came later – and my rubrics were pretty rudimentary because I wasn’t trained in those things (like so many of us who teach at the college level).
Imagine being a student and being told that your grade of C will reflect a measure of “hurts a little more” and your B reflects “hurts a little less”. Our students bring remarkable talents and skills and strengths to our classrooms. We want to honor and support those strengths, and one way to do that is to provide grading rubrics that help students study more effectively because they understand our expectations for their learning.
Faculty who are learning – or will soon learn – the features of Blackboard Ultra (the transition occurs with our Summer 2025 classes), will no doubt celebrate the rubric tool that is available. It will take the guesswork out of creating a rubric for an assignment. And of course faculty members can adapt that “draft rubric” as they see fit. Rubrics can help our students understand what we expect, and how we grade, and because we’re not all trained in crafting effective rubrics this tool in Blackboard Ultra will be very useful. I encourage all faculty to get acquainted with Blackboard Ultra and take advantage of all its features, including its AI-supported tool to develop rubrics. Let’s move away from ‘hurts a little less” to something more robust, specific, and informative for our students.